


something other than the desperation

by nonisland



Series: we were all forgiven, even though we didn't deserve it [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route Spoilers, Fix-It, Forgiveness, Full Recruitment Blue Lions Route, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Podfic Available, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:48:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24695542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonisland/pseuds/nonisland
Summary: Dimitri knows that you cannot measure forgiveness. Edelgard knows that you cannot promise hope. One of them is wrong.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Edelgard von Hresvelg
Series: we were all forgiven, even though we didn't deserve it [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1794526
Comments: 14
Kudos: 56





	something other than the desperation

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Richard Siken’s “[Litany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48158/litany-in-which-certain-things-are-crossed-out),” almost the whole of which I would love to quote here (or about Dimitri and/or Edelgard in general) but especially the bit from “in this version you are _not_ feeding yourself to a bad man against a black sky prickled with small lights” to “and we were all forgiven, even though we didn’t deserve it.”
> 
> Thanks to Scott for a) dragging me here and b) lorepicking afterward; any remaining errors are mine alone.
> 
> * * *

Dimitri knows that you cannot measure forgiveness. If it were rationed out, something to sustain an army on the march, he would take the whole Kingdom’s share and still starve. Instead it has been offered to him, easily, sweetly, open-heartedly. Too easily, but no one will listen.

Nevertheless he takes it, because he _was_ starving.

Edelgard’s war is a horrific wound across Fódlan: warriors left dead or maimed, grainfields turned to battlefields. Dimitri thinks of the men he has tortured while he looked into their eyes, and thinks of the warmth of Byleth’s hands holding him fast and refusing to let him go.

If he can be forgiven—if such forgiveness exists in this world—then there _cannot_ fail to be enough of it for Edelgard, too.

And so when they take Enbarr he sees it double, haunted with promise: Edelgard’s now; his own if necessary, if he fails. The commanders of his army know already to show mercy to civilians, but— “Burn as little of the city as possible,” he reminds them. To his friends, he adds, “That goes for us as well.”

Annette says, “It’s been a _while_ since the last time!” Mercedes pats her shoulder soothingly.

They advance.

Hubert falls to Byleth’s sword and Dorothea screams “ _Wait_ ,” her voice ringing even over the sounds of battle, almost as clear as if she were standing at Dimitri’s side. He turns to look at her and sees the shimmer in the air, racing from her hands, past Dimitri and past Byleth to settle around Hubert. There’s so much blood Dimitri can’t tell if Dorothea’s Physic has done anything—blood dripping off the sword, darkening the blazing gold of it.

He and Hubert hadn’t been friends, at the Academy. He doesn’t think Byleth had been close to him, either, but still—they’ve been lucky, so lucky, not to have had to kill anyone they’d known in happier days before now. Dimitri doesn’t deserve that luck, but the rest of them do.

Hooves on cobblestone. The beat of wings in the air. And still that fading shimmer running from Dorothea to Hubert, as she wrings all she can from her magic and cries, “Mer _ce_ des!”

Mercedes looks across the plaza at Dimitri.

It is easy to kill someone. It is impossible to bring back the dead. Dimitri looks a question at Byleth anyway, but Byleth’s nod is mere permission for the command he already wants to give.

He beckons; Mercedes runs. The demure rusty black of her skirts doesn’t show the blood as she drops to her knees in the pool of it, but her cuffs are soaked immediately.

Bernadetta’s horse, cavalry-trained as it is, shifts uneasily. Dimitri looks up and sees her knuckles on the reins are as chalky as her face.

The blood is still wet on Byleth’s sword. Time opens up as slowly as if they’re still in combat, every movement taking hours. Mercedes doesn’t say anything, but her hands are still shining bright, and if it were too late she would stand, surely. Of all of them, Mercedes must be too wise to waste time and effort on a truly lost cause.

It’s Ferdinand who says aloud, “If we hope to reach Edelgard, we cannot…” He trails off, looking from Hubert motionless under Mercedes’s hands to Bernadetta’s unsteady horse, and nudges his own mount over to where he can pry the reins away from Bernadetta.

Dimitri remembers the yawning bleakness when he believed Dedue to be dead, and nods. For Edelgard it would be worse: Dimitri had Felix, Ingrid, and Sylvain; had Byleth; had Gustave, and had had Rodrigue; had Annette, Mercedes, Ashe, and even the rest of the people he’d known at Garreg Mach. Edelgard, as she had told him, has never had that.

Marianne slips through so softly even Dimitri hardly notices her and sinks down across from Mercedes. Her skirts flood instantly crimson. Her hands are steady.

Mercedes’s shoulders go loose with relief. “Here, if you hold—”

“Then you can go deeper and…” Marianne doesn’t even finish the sentence, but Mercedes nods and takes a deep breath. Dimitri can’t tell if _Hubert_ is breathing between them, as Mercedes’s eyes close and light floods beneath his skin and sinks down.

Byleth wipes the blade of the sword dry and sheaths it. The blood on the cloth is still bright. Dorothea is trying to coax Bernadetta off her horse; Yuri looks like he’s about to drag her off bodily instead. Dimitri looks further around and sees that Hilda seems to be the worst-off of their united forces—her shield arm hangs at a gruesome angle, and Linhardt works to set the joint right again while Flayn works her way through the group mending cuts and arrow-wounds.

The palace looms ahead of them.

“It’s all right,” Marianne says. “Mercedes has him.”

Mercedes’s eyes flutter open again. She tries to brush a trickle of sweat off her cheek, but only manages to mix it with blood smeared across her face. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” she says, sweet and weary at the same time. “And someone will still need to stay with him.”

“Marianne,” Dimitri says. “Can you?” He wants Mercedes with them if she can be spared, and even more than that he trusts Marianne for this: her healing, the fierce blaze of her Aura, her courage. “I will leave a guard with you.”

“Me?” Marianne asks, wide-eyed, then nods. “If...if that is…yes.”

“I’ll stay too,” Hilda says, testing the range of motion in her arm and seeming satisfied with it. “It seems like an awful lot of work to storm the imperial palace.”

Dimitri disregards her words, as he has learned to do, and says simply, “I will leave the guard in your capable hands.”

Hilda sighs. “You really do make it too easy.”

“What?” Dimitri asks.

“Go,” Hilda says with a little wave of her hand. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to, just go stop her one way or another. And _don’t_ get sentimental about it.”

“I’ll keep an eye on them too,” Balthus says.

It’s impossible _not_ to be sentimental about it: it’s Edelgard. But Dimitri gathers himself together all the same, for one last brave speech and one last, last battle.

* * *

The pain of transformation rips Edelgard apart.

Beneath the palace all these years ago she had prayed, at first, until she realized that the hope in a powerful and benevolent goddess was a lie. A weakness, a distraction—something to make her docile and passive. If she still had faith, she would be waiting for someone else to save her.

She doesn’t pray now, as the husk sinks its roots into her flesh. She burns. She is a flame. That is all.

The crash of battle outside rises and dies down. Edelgard’s wings beat against the air. She has swung axes her own size and larger that hurt less than this easy, effortless motion. The world lurches around her with every thud of her pulse under what used to be her skin.

The door opens and Edelgard knows—a company under banners of Faerghus blue, their armor motley, their ranks a ragged dance. She sees mounts draped in the arms of Gautier and Galatea, of Gloucester, of Varley and Aegir. Byleth Eisner stands at Dimitri’s side, hand on the hilt of the Sublime Creator Sword, unearthly green eyes searching for Edelgard herself.

So, Enbarr has fallen, and Hubert is dead. It’s just as well that her plan has always been to fight on. She has no need to make decisions now.

She watches the invaders take on Myson and his mages. They win, of course. She knows better than to underestimate them again. All the same she hasn’t come this far to fail. She sends wave after wave of reinforcements, and watches them all fall. The stairwells of her palace grow slick with blood, the air thick with smoke.

If she still had her heart, it might break when Dimitri first catches sight of her. The horror on his face, the loathing—

But no, she has no softness left.

He stands in front of her, lance at the ready, and speaks to her as if they are a man and woman of honor, not a mad king and a broken emperor. He says, “If that is the future you hoped for—” and Edelgard laughs in his face.

“Hope?” she asks. “Whatever made you think I _hoped_ for anything?” Then she hits him with everything she has.

He shakes it off, with a youthful fearlessness she’d forgotten he’d once had. She hates him so sharply she can feel it even through the pain—he has friends, family. Byleth chose him. He has fought the horrors that chased him at the Academy, and he is winning.

Edelgard, with the husk tearing through her skin and drawing its own strength from her muscles, has already lost. She hurts so much that Dimitri’s lance through her side is nothing at all, that she cannot even spit defiance as her wings crumple and she falls to her knees at his feet.

She feels lighter. She must be dying, she thinks, as the pain drops away from her and she fights to remain upright. She would rather die on her feet—she would rather not die at all—but better on her knees than on her face.

A chunk of the husk drops to the carpet in front of her. With effort, Edelgard lifts a hand to her face and it comes away slick with blood but from soft, smooth skin. Her fingers are slim and pink, her nails blunt. Her dress is filthy with a mix of blood and what looks like char—the husk is crumbling like burned wood. She can’t feel the wound she took any more; she wonders if the husk took it, like armor, and left her own lungs whole.

Dimitri holds out a hand to her. All this— _all this_ —and he’s still the same soft-hearted fool she failed to reason with before.

She has his dagger at her side, still. Hubert had taught her how to throw a knife from concealment in a single motion. He’d done it reluctantly, grudgingly, but he had done it. Edelgard blinks to clear her vision. Dimitri’s armor is solid; she’ll have to aim for his throat or his eye—

“El,” Dimitri says softly, not moving. Byleth is steady at his side. His hands are broad, striped with calluses, the knuckles chapped. “Let me help you.”

“I don’t need your pity,” Edelgard says. She can’t _see_. She blinks again, but everything is still blurred and swimming. Blood is trickling down her cheeks from where the husk left her. It hurts so much. Even without the weight of the husk, it hurts.

“It’s not pity,” Dimitri says. “It’s what is right.”

The hilt of the dagger is cold to the touch. It’s a beautiful dagger. She wishes she could have cut a better path with it.

“I don’t want to tell you you are wrong.” Dimitri’s hand is still extended. Everything is very blurry and very bright. Edelgard wonders if she’s dying after all. “I want to _show_ you there is a better way.”

“You don’t understand.” Edelgard traces the movement her arm will need to take with her mind. Up and back, a quick flick of her wrist. She’ll have to do it quickly, before the last of her strength is gone. Waiting too long to strike has always been her weakness. She should have learned by now, but still she keeps talking. “You’ve never understood.”

Dimitri says, “You are fighting against a world without kindness. I want…I need to give you that. El.”

Every time he says _El_ it strikes through her like his lance again. He wields it as carefully, with as much weight. Edelgard fights for breath.

“Please don’t make me kill you.”

Byleth says quietly, “Mercedes and Marianne were able to save Hubert after we defeated him. If you won’t give Dimitri your surrender for your own sake, then think of—”

Byleth must keep talking, but Edelgard’s ears are ringing. She can’t understand a word. Colors smear together in her vision and rush away, clearing. Her hand slips from the dagger and she braces herself on the floor. She isn’t alone. She isn’t alone. She isn’t—

She reaches up and grabs Dimitri’s hand before she can fall. His fingers close around hers with incredible care, warm and sure, and then he takes a step closer and picks her up as easily as if she were a child.

“You’re hurt,” he says. “Mercedes!”

Mercedes’s white sleeves are brown with blood, her hands stained with it. Edelgard closes her eyes. Another weakness, but she’s too tired to be strong.

As the cool rush of healing magic washes through Edelgard, pulling her down to sleep, she remembers. “Dimitri—the ones who killed…our family. The professor’s father.”

Dimitri’s arms tense under her.

“We know who they are,” Edelgard whispers.

“Enough, Mercedes,” Dimitri says.

Edelgard drags the words up from some deep, deep well. “Hubert found them. You took…my empire away. Will you take…our side…in the fight?”

“I would be honored to.”

She has never understood the sincerity Dimitri can speak with, the whole-hearted openness, the bright faith. She doesn’t understand now, but she doesn’t have to understand. She believes him. That will do for now.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] we were all forgiven, even though we didn't deserve it](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28300956) by [growlery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/growlery/pseuds/growlery)




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